FBI Uniform Crime Reporting Program, Offenses Known to Law Enforcement (Return A)

One record per agency per month, 2021 through 2024. The compiled series reaches back to 1960; we hold the recent years.

Publication lags the present. The FBI closes a collection year the following spring — the submission deadline for the 2024 data year was April 1, 2025 — and the compilation is re-released after that (FBI FAQ).

Participation is voluntary and incomplete. The FBI states that non-federal agencies "can voluntarily submit their crime and law enforcement data to the program," and that "individual agencies that contribute data are responsible for adhering to the established standards of reporting, submitting accurate monthly statistics, and correcting errors in the data." For 2024, 16,675 agencies covering 325,100,512 people submitted, representing "95.6% of the population served by the agencies eligible to participate."

National coverage is therefore high but not complete, and far more uneven agency by agency: an agency may report every month, some months, or none. Hawaii is the thinnest-reporting state in the country — for 2024 only two Hawaii agencies submitted a full twelve months — and Florida is nearly as thin, which is why its own system supplies its counts. Where an agency reports no offenses of a kind and its surroundings make that implausible, we treat that as unreliable rather than as a true zero.

The 2021 move to the National Incident-Based Reporting System disrupted the series. Despite more than 11,500 agencies submitting incident-based data for 2021, the FBI reports that "participation remained below a statistically acceptable level to be nationally representative," and that it resumed accepting summary submissions for 2022 through 2024. Comparisons spanning 2021 cross that disruption.

Data are reported by agency for the jurisdiction it polices — a municipal police department, or a county sheriff covering the area no municipal department serves. Neither is a census tract, the grain the map displays, so a tract takes the rate of the jurisdiction covering it.

That limitation is severe: crime varies sharply within a jurisdiction, and a jurisdiction-wide rate flattens that variation. A city rate applied to a tract describes the city, not the neighborhood. See how we combine geographies.

Florida agencies largely report through the state's own system rather than to the FBI, so FDLE's FIBRS offense detail supplies coverage there. The FBI's own city tables are held as a reference copy but feed no published figure.

The FBI cautions against exactly the use a ranking tool invites. Rankings built from these figures "provide no insight into the many variables that mold the crime in a particular town, city, county, state, region, or other jurisdiction" and "lead to simplistic and/or incomplete analyses"; valid assessment requires "careful study and analysis of the various unique conditions affecting each local law enforcement jurisdiction" (FBI, Caution Against Ranking). Reported crime also reflects what residents report and what an agency records: a department that identifies more offenses can register a higher rate without more crime occurring.

Kaplan, Jacob. Jacob Kaplan's Concatenated Files - Uniform Crime Reporting Program Data, Offenses Known and Clearances by Arrest (Return A), 1960-2024. Ann Arbor, MI: Inter-university Consortium for Political and Social Research [distributor], 2025-08-21. https://doi.org/10.3886/E100707V22. Distributed under CC BY 4.0.

The underlying data are collected by the FBI's Uniform Crime Reporting Program, U.S. Department of Justice. Figures Birdseye derives from this source are our own estimates; the FBI and the compiler are sources of the original data only.